The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  It seemed to him that many of them were nourished by air: Caldicott (or so one hoped); the postmistress at Ironstone; himself even. Only Nance smacked her chops over a life-giving diet of glutinous, smoking meat.

  He decided to get up early the following morning; in fact, he was seldom seduced into lingering on the ridge of potato-sacks on which he had woken. An intensifying golden light was dusting the pelt of that lean animal his body. Stroking, scratching it, he was so detached, it owed him nothing but its captivity under a roof. His tactile mind was the part of him he cosseted: encouraging it to reach out, to cut through the webs of dew, to find moisture in the slippery leaves, the swords of grass, before the sun had sucked it up.

  He got into his pants, incidentally rather smelly, and stiff with recent wipings of paint. He strutted up and down, digging his hardened heels into the splintery boards, tearing at a loaf he had bought the afternoon before, guzzling and thinking and loving; while the moisture tinkled; feathers shook free of dust and dew; the morning shrieked, called, whipped and trolled out of the gorge. In between, silence made the loudest affirmation of all.

  Glutted finally with bread, light, sound, he returned to the attack on those giant rocks with which he was obsessed: to dissect on his drawing-board down to the core, the nerves of matter; but pure truth, the crystal eye, avoided him. He the ruthless operator was in the end operated on, and he flung off, groaning and drymouthed from the austerities of black and white. There were several versions of the same theme, some of them more advanced because less ambitious, and he healed himself by adding to their flesh, by disguising their scars, with touches and retouches of paint.

  ‘What’s it this time, I’d like to know?’

  The shock made him blunten what should have been the razor-edge of a mica sun.

  ‘Rocks,’ he mumbled, resentful, nauseated: under it all, frightened.

  ‘Looks more like cauliflower ears. Bloody boxers’ ears mucked up for ever by the glove.’

  He couldn’t avoid looking round at her.

  He saw that Nance and he were strangers to each other, only that Nance, who believed strangers didn’t exist for more than a second or two, had dumped all the stuff she had been lugging, was wetting her mouth, from which exertion had worn off most of the lipstick, and opening her eyes wider and wider, to swallow him up.

  He was stifling in the sweet, steamy smell of city nights.

  ‘You’re good!’ she munched when her appetite allowed. ‘You’re harder, Hurtle, than you used to be.’

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’ he complained.

  ‘What?’ She blenched as she went through the possibilities.

  ‘Your hair.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s the fashion. Don’t you like it?’

  She took off what, no doubt, she hoped was a dossy little hat. They had cut off the great, dusty, tumbling mare’s-tail of her hair. In place of it she showed a strong, pale-as-a-candle, shaven nape.

  ‘I like it;’ she said complacently, ‘though it’s gunner cost a lot in the long run. Have to get used to it—like payin’ the gas and electricity.’

  Her calves bulged more than he remembered, but he had never seen them so exposed, unless in the entirety of physical passion.

  ‘Look,’ she said, beginning to unpack her largesse from the carriers. ‘That’s potted pig’s-cheek.’ She smelled it. ‘Could ’uv gone off on the way. Didn’t oughterv brought pork.’

  Much had gone off, he suspected, since her cornucopia was emptied into his cell. Now that he had her, he didn’t in any way want her, or the grey marble of the pig’s-cheek, or pickles, or the rope of saveloys, or oranges—oranges everywhere: big open-pored navels rolling off the table. The dossy little hat was drifting gauzily over the floorboards. She was so absorbed in her activity she didn’t seem to notice that the pendulum pearls weighing down her lobes were bashing her savagely on the cheeks. She was looking for a tumbler, she said, to freshen up her ‘corsage’, but settled for an empty bottle when told there wasn’t such a thing as a glass. She filled the bottle with water from the tank, and after taking off their silver paper, stuck her wilted orchids in the neck.

  ‘A bloke give them to me Friday night—a business noise from Brissy.’

  Nance was so unconscious of her own vulnerability he couldn’t continue feeling resentful over what he no longer found in her, if that had ever existed: perhaps he had created it as something he needed at the time. He had to begin loving her again for what she was in the concrete present: her chipped-lacquer look; the restless activity of those fake pearls chained to her ears; the forms of her timeless body at the mercy of a travesty in salmon sateen.

  But he couldn’t have freed her. Didn’t want to touch her even.

  Nor did she want to be touched, it seemed: not after their first, and formally passionate, embrace. She was determined to appear hard, bright, self-contained, proficient in any of the domestic rites he mightn’t have thought she knew about; or possibly she was intimidated by unfamiliar surroundings.

  She kept turning round to look.

  ‘You’re sort of pigging it—and like it!’ she looked at him with the bright indulgence of a big sister, haunches overflowing the hard chair.

  Again staring around, rubbing her biceps as though to warm them, she said: ‘Golly, it’s quiet!’ and laughed.

  ‘It isn’t. You can hear something happening all the time.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said through her flaked lips, still rubbing at her own gooseflesh. ‘This is what I come out of. There was always the sound of heat, and hens, or a dog’s bark, or a sheep’s cough. Oh, yes—the ache of it! If I heard a sheep cough now, I’d jump out of me bloody shoes.’

  She was wearing gold ones, kid, which the stones must have martyred as she came down the track. When she saw him looking at them, she hid her feet under the chair.

  She said: ‘There’s an economical puddun I learnt from Mum I’ll have to make for yer while I’m here if I can remember what you put in.’

  On and off she picked at the food she had brought, which no longer looked as though it were there to be eaten. Nance seemed to prefer gum: perhaps the motion of her jaws made her feel she was doing something.

  She looked into the gorge. ‘What do you think you’re gunner get out of paintun an ugly old rock?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. Could be the answer.’

  ‘Eh?’ Her frown was an excruciated one. ‘I may not be what you’d call educated,’ she was beginning.

  ‘Oh God, Nance, I’m not educated!’

  ‘But you know enough not to make sense.’

  She sat training a piece of hair to curl around one of her cheekbones: the swinging pearl might have left a scar.

  ‘But rocks, I mean—who’s gunner ever even pay a tenner for a rock—without there’s someone sittun on it.’

  She crossed her legs, and bunched her knees, and drew up her skirt, but dropped it again in helplessness.

  ‘Nature’s all right,’ she said, ‘but it’s too big for most people. Last Sunday Billie Lovejoy—the old cow with the orange bristles on ’er chin—my landlady—Billie said: “Why don’t we take the ferry, Nance, and go on a little spree to Manly?” Why I agreed I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t value Billie Lovejoy not above a potful of piss, only that she’s ’uman—’uman, see? And a woman. Well, we took the ferry. There was a bloke tried to contact, but I wasn’t operatun that day. And I sorter got the gripes. All that water! And me an’ Billie sittun on the Steyne—the rollers they was too big—and glassy—beltun up the beach. Gee,’ she moaned, living it again, ‘I would ’uv trotted straight back for the return ride if it hadn’t been for the fellers lyin’ on the beach. ’Uman, see? The ’uman touch.’

  Her experience slowly released her limbs: they unlocked and she turned her face towards him. Her lips, he saw, were almost as pale as those of the postmistress at Ironside.

  ‘That’s the trouble, Hurtle,’ she slowly said. ‘That’s what
you aren’t. You aren’t a ’uman being.’

  ‘I’m an artist.’ It sounded a shifty claim.

  ‘You’re a kind of perv—perving on people—even on bloody rocks!’

  After erecting what appeared to be this impassable barrier, she asked where was the dunny, and he showed her.

  When she returned, she said: ‘Pe-ooh! It pongs! You ought ’uv dug it deeper.’

  ‘Couldn’t. Too much rock.’

  So they were up against it immediately. He no longer knew whether he was an artist, an ascetic, or a prig, as Nance Lightfoot’s conversation lurched like iron trams through the afternoon. But occasionally, as she allowed what she would have condemned as silence, to creep out of the gorge, he detected a changed key: birds sat longer on branches, their eyes brilliant in stuffed bodies, while little liquid tremors exerted the hitherto listless leaves.

  Till Nance jumped up. ‘Better get you yer tea, hadn’t I? Like I was your girl—not the Woolcott Street pross that ponced you.’ Throwing the rope of saveloys around her throat, as though it were a fur, or feather boa, she cackled at such a pitch every arrested bird was at once transformed into a shadow in motion.

  He let her do what she had to do. She boiled some of the saveloys, and they sat down and ate them after they had picked the skins off. The thick, rubbery skin toned in with the dress Nance was wearing for the country.

  Afterwards they continued sitting amongst the crumbs. At least he had his thoughts, and she presumably hers, as she tried to force a lump of gristle from between her teeth, first with her tongue, then with a peeled twig. What if he and Nance stuck for ever in the enamel of daylight and their own separate entities? He didn’t like to imagine. Didn’t have to, anyway; for the ashes of light had begun to fill the gorge, and as the red-hot ironstone cooled off along the ridges, and the heaped branches of the uppermost trees blazed in the last of the bonfire, a wind rushed in to douse: there was a hissing, and spitting, and clapping, and lapping, as the stream poured over live rocks and reviving leaves, the engulfed trees swaying, and tugging at their roots like submerged weeds, the gorge moaning its fulfilment.

  When the flood burst in through the windows and down their throats, Nance held the helmet of hair to her head; he was afraid she might be going to say: ‘Gee, it was a hot day, but now the change has come, and it was worth waiting.’

  She didn’t.

  Though they recognized each other’s bodies with delighted shivers and confirming touches, and though they staggered outside, holding hands, towards some intention unnamed by either of them, the cold floods of air and whirlpools of darkness divested them of their clothes of flesh. They couldn’t have entwined so closely if they hadn’t been so disintegrated, as part of the formless lunging and heaving, bitter-tasting lashed leaves, scabbards of flying bark, sand giving to the fingers, and stones which bruised, but barely bruised, the consciousness: they rushed into each other as the gusts of wind had entered the skeleton of the house.

  He woke as usual on the rucked layers of bags he still used as a bed. Nance was sitting up, in that very early light he took for granted: she was sagging horribly; her short, half-trained hair was hanging down around her grey face. Though they were dead sober in that there hadn’t been anything to drink, she looked like someone willing herself not to vomit.

  She was swaying and saying: ‘I’ve gotter get out of here—Hurtle.’

  ‘Why, Nance?’ He tried to soothe her with the palm of his hand; she didn’t respond. ‘I thought you were here for a holiday.’ He could hear something inside himself padding and squelching at thought of her departure as it had for her threatened arrival.

  He said: ‘I want you to stay, Nancy.’ It was a form of her name he hadn’t used at any point in their relationship.

  He fastened his mouth on the target of a breast while listening for an answer.

  She flipped him off.

  One of the oranges which had rolled off the table the afternoon before was lying almost at the edge of their ‘bed’. She took it up, and threw it, not exactly vindictively, at a canvas the other end of the room.

  ‘You an’ yer old rocks! There’s too much I don’t understand.’

  Then she turned to him and said: ‘You’ve got as much out of me as you want for the present.’

  He heard himself try to contradict, but it sounded mumbled, disconnected: to make it more convincing, he returned to stroking her arm.

  ‘Go on!’ she said, pulling away. ‘You’re such a one for lookin’ for the truth in everything, you oughter recognize it now.’

  ‘What’s true of one of us can be true of the other. You mightn’t have hit on it otherwise, Nance.’

  ‘Oh golly, yes!’ Her throat tautened as she tossed back her hair, holding up her face, not for his pleasure, but in a purely self-centred gesture, snorting down her suddenly finer nose, laughing through her blunt, wide-spaced teeth. ‘I’ll smell the pavement tonight! I’ll hear the bloody trams! None of that prick prick—of insects, or leaves, or whatever it is.’

  Now she allowed him to stroke her arm, which was bent back almost double-jointed in support of her arched body.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘you go on the job and know more or less what you’ll get. It’s what you never find that keeps you at it.’

  Then, realizing the extent of her confession, she collapsed whimpering: ‘I dunno what made me say that.’

  They fell upon each other, on the bags, in the tenderest demonstrations either of them could make: their mouths had become the softest, the most accommodating funnels of love.

  ‘You’re my real steady bloody permanent lover that I need and can’t do without,’ she cried, and rubbed against him, and cried.

  He was reminded of an old face-washer, often grubby, one of the maids had crocheted for him, in wide mesh, comforting in warm, soapy water: the opalescent shallows of childhood.

  He could feel that Nance too, had been comforted: their eyelashes were scratching the same message.

  While she pulled her stockings on, snapping the elastic a couple of times to make certain, she said: ‘Now you’ll be able to get back to yer rocks—because that’s what you want. But next time I come up,’ he was genuinely happy to know there would be a next time, ‘you’ll have ter paint me sittun on a rock showun me Louisa and everything. Praps I’ll wear a string of pearls. I know a girl that might give me the loan of an ostrich fan. I bet it’ll make your name, Hurt.’

  After she had run her finger round what had been the potted pig’s-cheek, she went. He watched her salmon buttocks swinging through the scrub. Once or twice the sateen caught on spikes, and for a moment opened into a pink parasol.

  He was both exhausted and rejuvenated by what she had drained out of him. In the slippery light and pricking silence, the pink rocks were still drowsing and exhaling: they hadn’t been fired yet.

  For several weeks he remained shut up in himself, that is to say: in his painting, while living off Caldicott’s gratuitous cheque, or guilt money, and the energy generated by Nance’s visit. If it occurred to him that Nance was prostituting herself to his art, or that Caldicott was his own blackmailer, he guessed each was perverse enough to enjoy the voluptuousness of any suffering involved.

  Whatever the moral climate, the painter continued perving on and painting Nance’s hated rocks. He stood each new version where he could catch sight of it the moment he woke. He saw most clearly by that light, and would jump up and sharpen a cutting edge, or intensify the reflections of his thinking sun.

  Until a morning when his glittering cerebrations bred in him such a hopelessness he trod flat-footed across the boards, alone in his aching, powerless body, and began a version practically unrelated to those he had done already. The big, pink, cushiony forms suggested sleeping animals rather than the rocks of his mind: they neither crushed nor cut, but offered themselves trustfully to the one-eyed sun scattering down on them a shower of milky seed or light. Done without forethought, unless he had planned it in his sleep, it wa
s over so quickly, compulsively, he didn’t want to look at it for fear of finding the disaster he suspected. He sat instead on the edge of the creaking veranda, dangling his empty hands between his thighs, while the gorge gave up its long, writhing viscera of mist.

  Caldicott wrote:

  Dear Duffield

  Since February is approaching, this is to remind you of your promise of three paintings for my mixed show. The others, so far, are a pretty staid lot. Dare I say: we depend on you to set the Harbour on fire!

  I enclose for your amusement the two snapshots we took the day of my visit.

  Kind regards

  m.c.

  In one of the snaps Caldicott was shyly attempting to look amused at the unlikely situation in which he had landed himself. His suit, his shirt, his forearms, all looked wrong for the occasion, but he stood propped against the edge of the veranda, hoping from under his wilting Panama to smile the unlikeliness off. In one corner of the picture the unpainted iron tank glared in ferocious competition. Caldicott had added a postscript to his letter:

  I don’t doubt these pictorial records will eventually increase my importance in the eyes of Australia, not to say the world.

  Hurtle grimaced to read it, and to look. He didn’t care to recognize the more substantial figure in the second photograph. He loathed what he saw. His only reason for wearing clothes could have been to appear clothed. He remembered deciding to receive his guest barefooted, to offend his sensibility. Now he was appalled by his own dirty, horny feet. In the snapshot they looked deformed. Or was it distorted? Just as you distort appearances to arrive at truth.

  Caldicott had come off better. After setting the camera for the picture, he had hurried round to add to the composition, in which he was shown as little more than a tremulous, adoring ghost.

  Duffield tore the two snapshots into little pieces, and began stumping with quick, febrile steps, on flat, calloused feet, through his jerry-built house. Not even his work offered a refuge: he had emptied himself of the obsessive rocks which had occupied him for so many weeks.